Monitor. Today i've bought a new 17'
monitor, to substitute my old 14' one that died
yesterday: now i know why i have to wear glasses!

Prototyping. I'm using (and learning)
Gtk-Perl for building a user interface prototype
(as part of the requirements analysis phase for
Pnyx, our e-voting product at scytl). Gtk-Perl is
really an excellent tool for this kind of job. The
more i use perl, the more i like it.

Music. I'm going to the opera tomorrow:
La Boheme, a wonderful masterpiece. And the
theatre is also a very nice one: El gran
teatre del Liceu, in Barcelona.

MDK. The new, Guile-aware
version of MDK is
finally out. It took ages to finish the
new user's manual's chapters, but i think it's been worth
the
effort. And the next version will be even better: i've just
received a mail from fxn with lots
of insightful comments on the docs. It is people like him
that make writting free software such a pleasure.

Job. The new job at scytl is really rewarding
and exciting. Quality is our motto, and i've got here the
rare
chance of practising software engineering the way i think it
must be done. That means lots of work, but pleasant work
it is (as we say in Spain, sarna con gusto no
pica). We are using LaTeX for writting
technical docs,
and it's really a joy: i'm having lots of fun re-discovering
it in its full power. I've been also reading C++
stuff: Meyer's Effective and More Effective
C++ books, and the really superb Exceptional C++
by Herb Sutter. Returning to C++, after all those months in
the barren lands of Java, makes me feel like a real
programmer again!

MDK. The Guile integration is progressing quite fast. I quickly discarded the C++ wrapper thing: the C interface is clear enough, and i didn't see a way of improving it in C++. By now, i'm able to interact with the MIX virtual machine from within a guile shell and the other way around: interpret scheme commands from the vm command prompt. This opens great possibilities, like implementing new functionality usin scheme... in short, MDK is beginning to be extensible. I plan to write new scheme extensions to access the MIX vm, and a little scheme lib for manipulating the MIX data types in the next few days, and then make a new release.

Tools. I've begun to use on a regular basis a tool to keep todo lists from the command line, devtodo, and found it really useful (thanks to fxn). A second wonderful discovery has been surfraw, a refreshing project consisting of a set of scripts to access common WWW search engines from the command line: don't miss the web page, it's worth reading!

I've released a new version of MDK (0.4.2) with a few bug
fixes and new toolbars for gmixvm (i've drawn a couple of
icons and got the others from gnome and kde apps). I've
restarted reading guile documentation and i'm playing with
the idea of a C++ wrapper (have been reading old issues of
the C/C++ Users Journal
and some chapters of Sutter's Exceptional C++...
man, that was real fun), but i'm not still sure if this
would be useful (feel free of telling me what do you think :-). In
any case, it's my preferred method for learning new things:
coding.

By the way, a couple of weeks ago i discovered how to
use anti-aliased fonts for Qt apps (even inside
WindowMaker; you just need export QT_XFT=true and XFree86
4) and Konqueror looks pretty nice: the quest for a browser
is over :-))

Job. I've quit my old job at iSOCO last week, and will
start working in a small, newly-founded crypto company
called SCYTL next month.
I got tired of e-business, B2B, B2C and all the buzzwords.
On the other hand, the people running SCYTL are friends of
mine (one of them, aleix is
also an advogater), i like cryptography, and i'll
have the chance of working on a software product
development: the decision was straightforward :-).

MDK. The 0.4 release is almost a month old, but
i've made little progress on new features. The next step
should be adding guile extensibility, but it's a lot of
work... btw, thanks to the great work of Agustin Navarro,
we already have Mandrake packages of mdk!

Books. Mostly reading crypto these days: Levy's
Crypto is not that bad, Kahn's The
Codebreakers is like reading a (very good) novel,
Scheneier's Applied cryptography is a must read, and
Koblitz's Algebraic aspects of cryptography nicely
brings up the beauty of crypto math...

Debian. Returned to using Debian GNU/Linux. Ok, i
know i've been writing a lot about how nice FreeBSD is,
but tried again Debian and couldn't help using it
again and again. I must admit package management using apt
and
dselect is a pleasure, and the Debian package
configuration is usually better and faster than FreeBSD's.
Finally, i'm a GPL/GNU guy, and, with Debian, it's easier
to keep my workstation non-free software clear.

Browser wars. Although Mozilla 0.9.2 is not that
bad, i'm using almost exclusively links and Konqueror
(when i want images). They're pretty stable, and
Konqueror's font handling is far, far better than
Mozilla's. Netscape is not even installed on my
workstation!.

Books. I've re-read Philip K. Dick's Ubik
(this time, the original English edition) and enjoyed it
like the first time. Nabokov tales (a birthday present)
are waiting on the shelves, once i finish Orwell's
Coming out for air. Man, i really need more free
time!.

FreeBSD. Finally, got portupgrade working, and
learned a bit more about the pkg_* utilities, and i can now
maintain my 4.2 box up-to-date quite comfortably. Still
think that something a la dselect would be useful,
though. It seems that the Debian/BSD
mailing list has resurrected latety. That's good news.

SICP. I'v learnt about lazy evaluation/streams
wonderland, and got impressed by its abstraction power.
This
technique lets you express some mathematical abstractions
on series elegantly and concisely. It's the same elegance
that you get in physics when representing three-dimensional
time evolving systems as a set of world-lines in four
dimensions: mind-boggling at first, but enlightening once
you grasp it.

The latest releases of Mozilla seem to be getting
usable,
and i'm giving it a(nother) try these days. It is a
resource hog, though, and i must fight hard against my
aversion to bloated software: i still use links for
browsing
local documentation.

(Yet) another release of MDK has hit the streets: 0.3.5. I
fixed some bugs left from the infamous 0.3.3 release,
improved the symbol table handling and coded an interface to
it in gmixvm. Afterwards, i've added the possibility of
detaching the MIXVM, MIXAL and Devices windows from the main
one. Thanks to the clear separation of the interface offered
by libglade, it's been a breeze.

I've returned to WindowMaker, my pre-Blackbox favourite wm:
now, i don't need to use the mouse at all (blackbox needs it
for the menus), the dockapps look better, and it runs almost
as fast as bb. In the meantime, i tried PWM, an
interesting wm with dockapp support and the possibility of
attaching multiple windows to the same frame. Worth a try,
but i still prefer WindowMaker or Blackbox.

Read a little bit about GNUstep and Objective-C, but i don't
like the Next look and feel that much (except for
WindowMaker), and Objective-C reminded me too much of Java,
so i came back to learning Scheme and Perl (Nigel Chapman's
Perl: The programmer's companion).

MDK. I have had to make two releases in a row. In the
first one (0.3.3) went all the new functionality (output
device formatting, compile and edit commands, command
history and bug fixes) together with a serious bug which
made gmixv to segfault on startup! So i had to rush a new
version fixing it (the current one, 0.3.4), causing havoc
to a lot of people (specially, the packages maintainers,
which have had double work; fortunately, they are very nice
guys :-).

Hacking. Learned a little vim, but i'm still hooked
on emacs for actual development. Nevertheless, vim is a nice
editor, and comes in very handy for editing config files and
scripts.